Bass sensed it slam into his chest, but not in a painful, gut-numbing way. Instead, as if the warrior had swung a long, stout limb of hickory at Titus as the white man rode past. Connecting with his breastbone so unmistakably solidly that its impact immediately made him weak to the soles of his moccasins. With a jerk he clamped down on the pistols with both cold hands, gritted his teeth around that braided rein, and did his best to lock his legs around the girth of his pony’s rib cage. But instead it was as if some unseen hand reached out and had him by the nape of the neck, yanking him loose and flinging him off the back of the horse.
The air exploded from his lungs in an audible gush as he hit the hard, frozen snow and slid more than five feet, ultimately stopping against a clump of eight-foot-high willow growing at the edge of the frozen beaver pond. Frantically sucking in a breath, he blinked that one eye clear and tried to look down at his chest. It was hard to breathe. Pulling apart the folds of his blanket coat and the buffalo-hide vest, he saw it … and it took his breath away. A small black hole was seeping a little red. But not near enough, he cheered himself—
Then heard the warrior’s shrill cry.
Rolling onto his left elbow, he flexed the fingers of both hands, found he had the pair of pistols still locked in them despite his fall from the pony … but discovered he had little strength to drag his legs under him. They were sluggish, almost like something once rigid or stiff now gone soggy and limp. They moved for him a little, and far too slowly as he attempted to rise. That war cry growing louder.
Bass managed to get turned slightly, recognizing the hard breathiness of the Blackfoot as the warrior bore down on him, a short war club held high overhead. Two blades, big ones, steel daggers, one protruding from each side of the club’s head, swung high in the air, where they sliced their way through the swirling dance of the wind-driven snowflakes. All of a sudden his stomach wanted to lurch with the sour, thick taste of blood gumming up the back of his throat.
He knew he’d been shot in the lights. The way a man would bring down his family’s supper. About the only way a man dropped as big a beast as a buffalo. Here he was … the old bull, he brooded. The old bull brought down by a shot to the lights.
But Titus forced back down what little contents his stomach held and squeezed his eyes shut an instant. Gasping for a breath as some blood and a little stomach bile gushed from his nostrils, the old mountain man pitched forward on hands and knees, coughing up red and yellow phlegm, managing to pivot onto one knee as the warrior loomed right in front of him.
His left hand bucked with the heavy powder charge in the pistol. On instinct he brought up the right hand at the target too, then caught himself for a heartbeat. Yellow Paint Elkskin was so close Bass could see his face, realize how young he was, less than half his own age … that smooth, flawless, un-lined flesh suddenly turning gray as his moccasins slipped out from under him and he pitched backward with the force of the lead ball at such close range. Bass was showered with icy snow the man’s spinning feet kicked up right in front of the trapper as the warrior crumpled backward with a grunt, hit the ground, then slowly kicked himself backward on the snow, using both of his legs in an ever-slowing cadence.
Turning at the sound of the hoofbeats, Scratch quickly reloaded the pistol with powder and ball as he prepared himself to find Slays in the Night, ready to tell his old friend that, sure, even though he’d been shot in the chest, it wasn’t all that bad. He’d make it through to night … if Slays and the others could only get a fire going to warm him. Titus was just beginning to sense the deepening cold growing there in the very core of him—
But it was Green-Stripe Blanket bounding out of the timber, cutting to his right around the edge of the pond and the tall reeds, then suddenly reining up in a spray of icy snow and pond water. Bass blinked, spotting the smear of blood soaking the warrior’s upper arm, as the Blackfoot wheeled his pony, called back up the hill.
Slowly, his head as unresponsive as a hundredweight pack of beaver hides, Scratch turned slightly … and found Painted Robe walking out of the scrub timber where Slays in the Night had followed the two. At the end of his left hand unmistakably hung the old Shoshone’s full scalp, the long black-and-gray hair dragging the new crust of snow.
He was alone. Except for Pretty On Top and the others. But the sounds of their fighting came from so, so far away. He was alone, with this pistol, and his two knives, and the short-handled tomahawk that rubbed against the base of his spine. Alone with these last two Blackfoot. Yet both of them did not matter. Only one now. Painted Robe. Because that warrior carried an old friend’s scalp.
The Blackfoot talked to one another. Not as if Bass could understand the two warriors, even really hear what they had to say in the shockingly cold air that seemed to cocoon around him all the more tightly, air so cold it was hard for him to catch his breath, nothing more than little gasps now. But—he watched their mouths moving as Green-Stripe Blanket urged his pony ahead a few more yards, then stopped halfway between the white man and the body of Yellow Paint Elkskin. As Titus’s head began to weave and he felt the immense cold seeping down from his chest and into his belly, Green-Stripe Blanket nudged his horse into motion again, angling up the side of the hill slightly, moving out of Bass’s vision now—gone to that left side where there was no seeing unless he managed to turn his head … that refused to budge.
Then he heard Painted Robe’s moccasins crunch on the crusty snow and willed himself to look at that enemy. The warrior was yelling something to the unseen horseman. Then the Blackfoot started walking again, coming boldly around the upper end of the beaver meadow, where some of the stunted trees had been felled by the industrious flat-tails. One of them was still behind him, he remembered. And turned with a jerk that made his head swim.
But he found Green-Stripe Blanket had remained motionless, his pony standing uneasily over the bloodied body of Buffalo Horn Headdress. He yelled something at Painted Robe, then pointed off to the body of Red Coat.
Painted Robe cried angrily, shaking the Shoshone’s scalp.
But Scratch’s eye was drawn back to Green-Stripe Blanket as the warrior dropped to the ground. He tugged on the knot in that bright red sash that held the blanket around his waist and pulled a pistol from the sash as he freed the rein from his other mitten. That enemy was closer, Titus decided, and started to twist his upper body around so he could aim his last pistol at the nearer of his two enemies.
Yet while Green-Stripe Blanket stood only a matter of yards away, the warrior did not raise his pistol to fire. Instead he merely stared, his eyes glowing like coals there inside the hood made from the hide of a gray prairie wolf. Studying the white man.
I’m being given this chance, Scratch thought. This one last chance before he shoots—
The pistol bucked in his hand, and Green-Stripe Blanket visibly flinched as the ball passed harmlessly over his shoulder.
Damn, he thought as the realization that he had missed slapped him. Scratch crumpled forward onto his hands in the snow as he started to heave, his stomach spewing what little it held, blood and bile dripping from his lips and out of his nostrils too, steamy and warm on the frozen snow between his knees. He coughed, gagging some more—then recognized the sound of footsteps.
Turning his heavy head in that direction, he expected to find Green-Stripe Blanket come to finish him off with his pistol, but instead it was Painted Robe, carrying that long, black-and-gray scalp in one hand and a small-headed tomahawk in his right—the blade and some of the haft glistening with frozen blood. Fixing his gaze on that limp, bloody scalp, Titus wrenched himself backward, unsteadily rocking onto his knees until he managed to hold himself steady and reached around to the small of his back with his left hand, feeling for his own tomahawk. He needed it now that he held his last loaded firearm. With the heel of that hand clutching the tomahawk, Scratch shoved back the hammer to full cock and brought his wobbly arm up, the muzzle of the weapon weaving side to side across its target.